Barcodes are essential for selling products through most retailers or distributors. In Canada, barcodes are unique numbers for products, not data itself, used for quick entry into retail systems by scanners reading black/white lines; they start with a country prefix (like 0 or 754-755 for Canada), followed by a company prefix, item number, and a final check digit for accuracy, all managed globally by GS1 Canada, ensuring global uniqueness for tracking items through the supply chain.
The barcode is the linear machine-readable component (vertical lines), and the UPC is the human readable component (numbers). Here is a diagram of a barcode showing the three distinct sections:
